People familiar with online Finnish slang will know that the word paska âshitâ has been developing morphological variants. Most prominently, for several years now, it has had a variant partitive singular paskea besides the usual paskaa. A YouTube video uploaded on Xmas 2014 is often credited for popularizing this. Attestations occur much earlier though. At least two blog posts from 2008 and 2012 are still found already by Google, several further attestations turn up in the Suomi24 Corpus 2001â2017 (starting from 2007) and one also in the Ylilauta Corpus 2012â2014.
In origin this form is probably not completely arbitrary. paska does double duty in colloquial Finnish as a noun: koiran paska âdogshitâ; and as an adjective: paska koira âa shit(ty) dogâ. (The second sense is probably a calque from English.) Also, -ea is a common adjectival ending, no longer actively productive but still available to analogical extension at least. So my hypothesis would be that paskea was first coined as a nonce adjective âshittyâ or âshit-likeâ. Good reference points for analogy would be e.g. ruskea âbrownâ, surkea âterribleâ. Early on, Suomi24 uses tend to be indeed mostly adjectival: ÀÀrimmĂ€isen paskea kĂ€yttökelvotonjĂ€rjestelmĂ€ âextremely shitty inoperating systemâ, se paskea vĂ€ri âthe shit-like colorâ, verisen paskea vaikutelma âbloody-and-shitty impressionâ, linsucks on (âŠ) paskea mm. musiikin tekemisessĂ€ âlinsucks is shitty e.g. for making musicâ (from 2013â2014).
As the next step, a predicative construction N on paskea (593 Ghits), equivalent to N on paska âN is shittyâ, could be with a little linguistic creativity also parsed as a partitive mass noun construction, equivalent to N on paskaa âN is shitâ. From here itâs possible to branch into what seem to be the most common other usages: interjective constructions like hyi vittu paskea âew fuck [thatâs] shitâ (313 Ghits; appears in the YouTube source and probably often quoted from it), mitĂ€ paskea âwhat the shitâ (229 Ghits), ihan paskea âreally shitâ (127 Ghits); or oblique case constructions like translative paskeksi (71 Ghits), essive paskena (38 Ghits), ablative paskelta (21 Ghits), adessive paskella (16 Ghits). Subject or attribute uses like paske juttu â[a] shitty tale/eventâ (9 Ghits), pasket housussa âwith shit in pantsâ (6 Ghits), paske haisee âsmells of shitâ (1 Ghit) remain less common. I can actually also find attestations of nominative singular in -i (e.g. paski juttu 6 Ghits), showing that itâs not even clear what inflection type a partitive paskea would imply.
More common by an order of magnitude is however a contraction noun paske : paskee- (pasketta 7140 Gh, paskeeksi 723 Gh, paskeella 290 Gh, paskeessa 261 GhâŠ); attested from Suomi24 at least since 2004 and heavily also from Ylilauta. This, however, has in much of its uses a more specific meaning âshitty productâ: car, computer hardware or software, music, etc. This would appear to be an independent derivative/coinage, and also one following normal Finnish word derivation patterns, not any kind of weird analogical development.
Starting from this, reanalysis of the nominative paske could even also yield the unalternating e-stem discussed above⊠but this is not supported by the heavily oblique-stem uses of paske-, nor by the different semantics. This however does not have to mean that the recent development of these two word groups would be unrelated entirely. Since adjectives in -ea are rendered as -ee in colloquial Finnish (kovalevy on paskee â[the] hard drive is shittyâ), the other option is that the adjective is what has been inspired by this derived noun, then still followed by analogy to an e-stem noun as outlined above. Partitives, too, take part in this smoothing, so also the original analogy from an adjective to a partitive could have happened before standardization from paskee to paskea.
If this all checks out, the history altogether is then as follows:
paska â paske : paskeen âshitty productâ (by 2004)
paska â paskee âshittyâ
reanalyzed â paskee âshit.PARTâ (by 2007)
standardized â paskea (by 2008)
extended â paske (? paski) : pasken âshitâ
Stage 2 actually finds its first attestation only by 2012; but all attestations available to me are scarce before 2014. No doubt all of these have moreover spent their early years in more ephemeral media like chatrooms before appearing into reliably archived writing.